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This is sort of a "Twitter F*cks Republican U.S. reps" story.
Republicans held a hearing to prove Twitter’s bias against them. It backfired in spectacular fashion
Republicans held a hearing to prove Twitter’s bias against them. It backfired in spectacular fashion
Republicans are living in a reality distortion field.
That is the only conclusion that can be drawn from Wednesday’s hearing on Capitol Hill where GOP lawmakers continued to push a factually unsupported narrative about the federal government secretly colluding with Twitter to censor the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020.
Despite no real evidence to support this weighty and consequential claim, Republicans were unrelenting in peddling it to the American public. At Wednesday’s hearing they showed no regard for misinforming those who turn to them for accurate information or the fact that they were smearing a private business and its former executives in the process.
But they did uncover some bias...The facts — reality — simply do not matter. It didn’t move one Republican when the Twitter executives they had subpoenaed before the committee refuted their claims. And it didn’t matter much to the right-wing media apparatus that blindly repeated them to their audiences.
“I am aware of no unlawful collusion with, or direction from, any government agency or political campaign on how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop situation,” James Baker, Twitter’s former deputy counsel, told the committee while under oath.
And Matt Taibbi, one of the journalists Musk handpicked last year to comb through Twitter’s internal messages for evidence of free speech violations, said himself that “there is no evidence — that I’ve seen — of any government involvement in the laptop story.”
Naturally, they didn't give a shit about any of that.Ironically, the hearing appeared to reveal that Twitter had acquiesced to Trump and changed its policies after it concluded that he had violated its rules.
Anika Collier Navaroli, a former senior employee on Twitter’s content moderation team, testified that the social media company ended its ban on abusive language against immigrants to “go back to where they came from” so that Trump would not face repercussions for his racist 2019 attack on four minority Democratic congresswomen. “So much for bias against right-wing on Twitter,” Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez replied.
And the hearing hinted that the Trump White House attempted to censor the speech of at least one American: Chrissy Teigen. When Teigen called Trump a series of expletives in 2019, Navaroli testified that she was told the Trump White House contacted Twitter and demanded that it be removed.

















